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Meditation teaches you the power of your perceptions. You come to see how
the labels you apply to things, the images with which you visualize
things, have a huge influence over what you see, how they can weigh you
down with suffering and stress. As the meditation develops, though, it
gives you the tools you need to gain freedom from that influence.

In the
beginning, when you first notice the power of perception, you can easily
feel overwhelmed by how pervasive it is. Suppose you're focusing on the
breath. There comes a point when you begin to wonder whether you're
focusing on the breath itself or on your idea of the breath. Once
this question arises, the normal reaction is to try to get around the idea
to the raw sensation behind it. But if you're really sensitive as you do
this, you'll notice that you're simply replacing one caricature of the
breath with another, more subtle one. Even the raw sensation of breathing
is shaped by how you conceptualize raw sensation. No matter how hard you
try to pin down an unfiltered experience of breathing, you still find it
shaped by your idea of what breathing actually is. The more you pursue the
reality of the breath, the more it recedes like a mirage.

The trick
here is to turn this fact to your advantage. After all, you're not
meditating to get to the breath. You're meditating to understand the
processes leading to suffering so that you can put an end to them. The way
your relate to your perceptions is part of these processes, so that's
what you want to see. You have to treat your experience of the breath, not
as an end in itself, but as a tool for understanding the role of
perception in creating suffering and stress.

You do this
by de-perception: questioning your assumptions about breathing,
deliberately changing those assumptions, and observing what happens as a
result. Now, without the proper context, de-perception could easily wander
off into random abstractions. So you take the practice of concentration as
your context, providing de-perception both with a general direction and
with particular tasks that force it to bump up against the operative
assumptions that actually shape your experience of the present.

The general
direction lies in trying to bring the mind to deeper and more long-lasting
levels of stillness so as to eliminate more and more subtle levels of
stress. You're not trying to prove which perceptions of the breath depict
it most truly, but simply which ones work best in which situations for
eliminating stress. The objectivity you're looking for is not the
objectivity of the breath, but the objectivity of cause and effect.

The
particular tasks that teach you these lessons begin with the task of
trying to get the mind to stay comfortably focused for long periods of
time on the breath -- and right there you run into two operative
assumptions: What does it mean to breathe? What does it mean to be
focused?

It's common
to think of the breath as the air passing in and out through the nose, and
this can be a useful perception to start with. Use whatever blatant
sensations you associate with that perception as a means of establishing
mindfulness, developing alertness, and getting the mind to grow still. But
as your attention gets more refined, you may find that level of breath
becoming too faint to detect. So try thinking of the breath instead as the
energy flow in the body, as a full body process.

Then make
that experience as comfortable as possible. If you feel any blockage or
obstruction in the breathing, see what you can do to dissolve those
feelings. Are you doing anything to create them? If you can catch yourself
creating them, then it's easy to let them dissolve. And what would make
you create them aside from your preconceived notions of how the mechanics
of breathing have to work? So question those notions: Where does the
breath come into the body? Does it come in only through the nose and
mouth? Does the body have to pull the breath in? If so, which sensations
do the pulling? Which sensations get pulled? Where does the pulling begin?
And where is the breath pulled from? Which parts have the breath, and
which ones don't? When you feel a sensation of blockage, which side of the
sensation are you on?

These
questions may sound strange, but many times your pre-verbal assumptions
about the body are strange as well. Only when you confront them head-on
with strange questions can you bring them to light. And only when you see
them clearly can you replace them with alternative concepts.

So once you
catch yourself breathing uncomfortably in line with a particular
assumption, turn it around to see what sensations the new assumption
highlights. Try staying with those sensations as long as you can, to test
them. If, compared to your earlier sensations associated with the breath,
they're easier to stay with, if they provide a more solid and spacious
grounding for concentration, the assumption that drew them to your
attention is a useful new tool in your meditation. If the new sensations
aren't helpful in that way, you can throw the new tool aside.

For example,
if you have a sense of being on one side of a blockage, try thinking of
being on the other side. Try being on both. Think of the breath as coming
into the body, not through the nose or mouth, but through the middle of
the chest, the back of the neck, every pore of your skin, any spot that
helps reduce the felt need to push and pull.

Or start
questioning the need to push and pull at all. Do you feel that your
immediate experience of the body is of the solid parts, and that they have
to manage the mechanics of breathing, which is secondary? What happens if
you conceive your immediate experience of the body in a different way, as
a field of primary breath energy, with the solidity simply a label
attached to certain aspects of the breath? Whatever you experience as a
primary body sensation, think of it as already breath, without your having
to do anything more to it. How does that affect the level of stress and
strain in the breathing?

And what
about the act of staying focused? How do you conceive that? Is it behind
the breath? Surrounded by breath? To what extent does your mental picture
of focusing help or hinder the ease and solidity of your concentration?
For instance, you may find that you think of the mind as being in one part
of the body and not in others. What do you do when you focus attention on
another part? Does the mind leave its home base -- say, in the head -- to
go there, or does the other part have to be brought into the head? What
kind of tension does this create? What happens if you think of awareness
already being in that other part? What happens when you turn things around
entirely: instead of the mind's being in the body, see what stress is
eliminated when you think of the body as surrounded by a pre-existing
field of awareness.

When you ask
questions like this and gain favorable results, the mind can settle down
into deeper and deeper levels of solidity. You eliminate unnecessary
tension and stress in your focus, finding ways of feeling more and more at
home, at ease, in the experience of the present.

Once the mind
is settled down, give it time to stay there. Don't be in too great a hurry
to move on. Here the questions are, "Which parts of the process were
necessary to focus in? Which can now be let go? Which do you have to hold
onto in order to maintain this focus?" Tuning into the right level of
awareness is one process; staying there is another. When you learn how to
maintain your sense of stillness, try to keep it going in all situations.
What do you discover gets in the way? Is it your own resistance to
disturbances? Can you make your stillness so porous that disturbances can
go through without running into anything, without knocking your center off
balance?

As you get
more and more absorbed in exploring these issues, concentration becomes
less a battle against disturbance and more an opportunity for inner
exploration. And without even thinking about them, you're developing the
four bases of success: the desire to understand things, the persistence
that keeps after your exploration, the close attention you're paying to
cause and effect, and the ingenuity you're putting into framing the
questions you ask. All these qualities contribute to concentration, help
it get settled, get solid, get clear.

At the same
time, they foster discernment. The Buddha once said that the test for a
person's discernment is how he or she frames a question and tries to
answer it. Thus to foster discernment, you can't simply stick to pre-set
directions in your meditation. You have to give yourself practice in
framing questions and testing the karma of those questions by looking for
their results.

Ultimately,
when you reach a perception of the breath that allows the sensations of
in-and-out breathing to grow still, you can start questioning more subtle
perceptions of the body. It's like tuning into a radio station. If your
receiver isn't precisely tuned to the frequency of the signal, the static
interferes with the subtleties of whatever is being transmitted. But when
you're precisely tuned, every nuance comes through. The same with your
sensation of the body: when the movements of the breath grow still, the
more subtle nuances of how perception interacts with physical sensation
come to the fore. The body seems like a mist of atomic sensations, and you
can begin to see how your perceptions interact with that mist. To what
extent is the shape of the body inherent in the mist? To what extent is it
intentional -- something added? What happens when you drop the intention
to create that shape? Can you focus on the space between the droplets in
the mist? What happens then? Can you stay there? What happens when you
drop the perception of space and focus on the knowing? Can you stay there?
What happens when you drop the oneness of the knowing? Can you stay there?
What happens when you try to stop labeling anything at all?

As you settle
into these more formless states, it's important that you not lose sight of
your purpose in tuning into them. You're here to understand suffering, not
to over-interpret what you experience. Say, for instance, that you settle
into an enveloping sense of space or consciousness. From there, it's easy
to assume that you've reached the primordial awareness, the ground of
being, from which all things emerge, to which they all return, and which
is essentially untouched by the whole process of emerging and returning.
You might take descriptions of the Unconditioned and apply them to what
you're experiencing. If you're abiding in a state of neither perception
nor non-perception, it's easy to see it as a non-abiding, devoid of
distinctions between perceiver and perceived, for mental activity is so
attenuated as to be virtually imperceptible. Struck with the apparent
effortlessness of the state, you may feel that you've gone beyond passion,
aversion, and delusion simply by regarding them as unreal. If you latch
onto an assumption like this, you can easily think that you've reached the
end of the path before your work is really done.

Your only
protection here is to regard these assumptions as forms of perception, and
to dismantle them as well. And here is where the four noble truths prove
their worth, as tools for dismantling any assumption by detecting the
stress that accompanies it. Ask if there's still some subtle stress in the
concentration that has become your dwelling place. What goes along with
that stress? What vagrant movements in the mind are creating it? What
persistent movements in the mind are creating it? You have to watch for
both.

In this way
you come face to face with the perceptions that keep even the most subtle
states of concentration going. And you see that even they are
stressful. If you replace them with other perceptions, though, you'll
simply exchange one type of stress for another. It's as if your ascending
levels of concentration have brought you to the top of a flag pole. You
look down and see aging, illness, and death coming up the pole, in
pursuit. You've exhausted all the options that perception can offer, so
what are you going to do? You can't just stay where you are. Your only
option is to release your grip. And if you're letting go fully, you let go
of gravity, too.